Lovely Lavender

A while ago I read the beautiful and elegantly written debut novel ‘The Language of Flowers’ by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. The book is about a young woman’s gift for using flowers and the language of flowers to change the lives of others around her. Meaning has been attributed to flowers for thousands of years but it was in Victorian England that the interest in floriography soared. Armed with floral dictionaries, Victorians used gifts of floral arrangements to send coded messages to someone else, allowing the sender to express feelings which could not be spoken aloud in Victorian society. 

This past weekend my mom stayed over and to decorate her room Daniel helped me to cut lavender flowers from our garden. The garden is a bit of a sad sight at the end of winter and I wish the rains would come and allow the bare garden to blossom. So, taking into account the (lack of) diversity of flowers available to pick in the garden, I do like the message of lavender. In the language of flowers, the lavender flower’s most common meaning is love and devotion but it is also associated with purity, silence and caution. It represents luck when given as a gift and offers the promise of new adventure.